You’d be surprised how much cool free as in free beer (i.e., it doesn’t cost you any money) stuff is out there!

Chances are a decent chunk of the software you use is free. If anything, the websites you frequent sure are! People pour their heart and soul into content, music, software… and then give it out for free! (Yeah yeah, sometimes it runs on ad revenue. Still “faifb” though.) Isn’t that amazing? The willingness to share freely that which could easily be charged professional-level sums for.

“Part of my day”-style example, I looked up how OpenEmu (free, open-source software) retrieves the information for the games you throw at it, like publisher, release date, system, etc. Turns out it uses OpenVGDB, a free, open video game database! Remember how I counted roughly 2050 unique games in a Game Boy (Color) ROM collection? The OpenVGDB contains over 3000 GB(C) entries! And it’s all available for free!

Man, the GitHub page for OpenVGDB doesn’t contain much information. If there was a donate link or something, or even a paywall to the database, I’d pay a fair sum to access it. Someone took the time to compile all that information into a literal database so that’s it’s readily accessible by most everyone, everywhere.